Beleaguered London

A Month had passed since the battle of Dover. It had been a month of
incessant fighting, of battles by day and night, of heroic defences and
dearly-bought victories, but still of constant triumphs and irresistible
progress for the ever-increasing legions of the League. From sunrise to
sunrise the roar of artillery, the rattle of musketry, and the clash of
steel had never ceased to sound to the north and south of London as,
over battlefield after battlefield, the two hosts which had poured in
constant streams through Harwich and Dover had fought their way,
literally mile by mile, towards the capital of the modern world.

Day and night the fighting never stopped. As soon as two hostile
divisions had fought each other to a standstill, and from sheer
weariness of the flesh the battle died down in one part of the huge
arena, the flame sprang up in another, and raged on with ever renewed
fury. Outnumbered four and five to one in every engagement, and with the
terrible war-balloons raining death on them from the clouds, the British
armies had eclipsed all the triumphs of the long array of their former
victories by the magnificent devotion that they showed in the hour of
what seemed to be the death-struggle of the Empire.

The glories of Inkermann and Balaclava, of Albuera and Waterloo, paled
before the achievements of the whole-souled heroism displayed by the
British soldiery standing, as it were, with its back to the wall, and
fighting, not so much with any hope of victory, for that was soon seen
to be a physical impossibility, but with the invincible determination
not to permit the invader to advance on London save over the dead bodies
of its defenders.

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Such a gallant defence had never been made before in the face of such
irresistible odds. When the soldiers of the League first set foot on
British soil the defending armies of the North and South had, with the
greatest exertions, been brought up to a fighting strength of about
twelve hundred thousand men. So stubborn had been the heroism with which
they had disputed the progress of their enemies that by the time that
the guns of the League were planted on the heights that commanded the
Metropolis, more than a million and a half of men had gone down under
the hail of British bullets and the rush of British bayonets.

Of all the battlefields of this the bloodiest war in the history of
human strife, none had been so deeply dyed with blood as had been the
fair and fertile English gardens and meadows over which the hosts of the
League had fought their way to the confines of London. Only the weight
of overwhelming numbers, reinforced by engines of destruction which
could strike without the possibility of effective retaliation, had made
their progress possible.

Had they met their heroic foes as they had met them in the days of the
old warfare, their superiority of numbers would have availed them but
little. They would have been hurled back and driven into the sea, and
not a man of them all would have left British soil alive had it been but
a question of military attack and defence.